Private Professor

Writing Compelling Dialogue for Fiction

How to Make Your Characters Sound Like Real People (Not the Writer in Disguise)

You've read dialogue that crackles—where you can hear each character's voice, feel the tension beneath polite words, and forget you're reading at all. Then you try to write it, and your characters all sound like... you. Flat. Interchangeable. Saying exactly what they mean. The problem isn't talent—it's that no one explained the counterintuitive rules of how fictional dialogue actually works.